Remote copy systems have been used for automatically providing data backup at a remote site in order to insure continued data availability after a disaster at a primary site. Such a remote copy facility is described in Ofek, U.S. Pat. No. 5,901,327 issued May 4, 1999, entitled “Bundling of Write Data from Channel Commands in a Command Chain for Transmission over a Data Link Between Data Storage Systems For Remote Data Mirroring.” This remote copy facility uses a dedicated network link and a link-layer protocol for 1:1 replication between a primary storage system and a secondary storage system.
More recently remote copy systems have been used for wide-area distribution of read-only data. Wide-area distribution of the read-only data is useful for preventing remote users from overloading a local server, and for reducing signal transmission delay because the remote users may access remote copies nearer to them. For example, as described in Raman et al., U.S. Patent Application Publication No. US 2003/0217119 A1, published Nov. 20, 2003, incorporated herein by reference, consistent updates are made automatically over a wide-area IP network, concurrently with read-only access to the remote copies. A replication control protocol (RCP) is layered over TCP/IP providing the capability for a remote site to replicate and rebroadcast blocks of the remote copy data to specified groups of destinations, as configured in a routing table.
Currently there is a need for replicating diverse data storage objects in a way that is scalable and efficient and may use a replication control protocol for one-to-many replication and cascaded replication over a data network.